Part of the struggle against Cuba's communist dictatorship, online and elsewhere, is stripping away the myths about Fidel Castro's chief executioner — and revolutionary hero to many fools — Ernest "Ché Guevara. The T-shirts, posters and Web sites glorifying this butcher are evidence some people, whether willfully or out of ignorance, just don't get it.
I hope I did my part exposing Ché in this newspaper column from October 2004. Of the many articles I have written over the years, it is one of those of which I am most proud. I have published links to it before, but here it is in its entirety.
Che' Guevara's bloody legacy lives on (Originally published Oct. 8, 2004)
Thirty-seven years ago, on Oct. 9, 1967, the communist revolutionary Ernesto "Che'" Guevara was hunted down by a U.S.-trained counterinsurgency unit, captured and summarily executed in Bolivia, where he was fomenting the latest Latin American revolution of the day.
Good riddance.
The same cannot be said of the horrific legacy he left the world, especially in Cuba, which still suffers from the brutal tyranny he helped install. Only Fidel Castro was more responsible than Guevara, whose veins bled communist red, for taking a revolution that might have been about real democracy and turning it into a 45-year nightmare for the Cuban people, and the world.
Many in my family, including my parents, were able to escape Cuba for the American dream. But millions of their countrymen still suffer in a hell Guevara helped create.
Is this the same iconic Che' whose mug today adorns T-shirts and posters in college dorms?
Is this the same Che' whose story as a young man is being told in the new movie, "The Motorcycle Diaries?" which is based on Guevara's autobiography and produced by Robert Redford?
Is this the Che' who in the words of his biographer, Jorge' Castañeda, is "a symbol of a time when people died heroically for what they believed in"?
The one and the same. But as happens often in today's celebrity-driven culture, where history is free to be revised or forgotten for your own purposes — especially if you want to stick it to the imperialist yanquis — the killer is not the Che' Guevara you know.
Instead, you only hear about the Che' Guevara, who with his best buddy, hopped on a motorcycle and rode across 1950's South America, like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in "Easy Rider," to discover himself and the world around him.
That is not Guevara's true legacy, or at least how he made his true mark on the world. He is more properly judged as a cold-hearted killer.
Here's a little history.
In the final battles of 1958 against the dictator Fulgencio Batista, the Argentine-born Guevara, who had met Castro a few years earlier in Mexico, led a column of rebel fighters that defeated the Cuban army at Santa Clara, the second-largest city in the country.
Guevara held several positions in the new regime, including an economic portfolio that allowed him to communize the Cuban economy, which to this day holds most Cubans down in poverty.
But Guevara's most notable role was as Castro's button-man, presiding over trials and executions not unlike those held after other revolutions in France, Russia and elsewhere. In an article published in February, Cuban-American writer Humberto Fontova noted that, depending on the source, Guevara ordered between 500 and "several thousand" executions during the first few years of the new regime.
"Equally important," Fontova wrote, "his massacre cowed and terrorized. There were all public trials. And the executions, right down to the final shattering of the skull with the coup de grace from a massive .45 slug fired at five paces, were public, too. Guevara made it a policy for his men to parade the families and friends of the executed before the blood-, bone- and brain-spattered paredon," or wall.
No amount of glorification or revisionist history — whether by some misinformed college kid, who maybe doesn't know better, or a Hollywood elite like Robert Redford, who should — can remove the blood from Guevara's rightful legacy.
If Hollywood or academia wants to lionize a true hero, they should honor one of Guevara's victims, the Cuban poet and journalist, Raul Rivero.
Rivero, Cuba's leading independent journalist, was arrested on March 18, 2003, as part of a crackdown on about 80 alleged dissidents. Rivero and others had signed an open letter to the government calling for more openness and freedom in Cuba. In a secret one-day trial, he was convicted of assorted "subversions," including collusion with the United States, and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Two years before he was arrested, Rivero wrote an essay for an Argentine newspaper explaining his dissent — and demonstrating why he is more of a hero to emulate than a butcher like Guevara.
"The path I set out on a few years ago, after a total rupture with the government's press and cultural media, has transformed me into a different human being, someone who has liberated himself on his own, someone who in threatened and hostile circumstances could begin the journey toward individual freedom.
"Fear, prison and harassment have served only to give more value to these discoveries. They have contributed to the fact that my devotion to the sovereignty of the individual is now much more than an idea or a necessity; it is an untamable instinct."
I can't wait to see the movie about Raul Rivero.
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